Where Vultures Feast Shell Human Rights And Oil

This study offers an interpretation of political change in Israel through an examination of amendments to Israel’s personal status laws (PSLs)—laws governing marriage, divorce, death, inheritance, and adoption. I found that separate ethno-religious groups, including Arab Muslims, non-Western Jews, and non-religious persons (including some secular Jews), do not enjoy equal access to the civil right of marriage and divorce that citizens commonly enjoy within other Western liberal nations. Marriage and divorce within Israel are only accessble through, and sanctioned by, religious institutions. I argue that Israel’s PSLs reflect a significant paradox within liberalism, namely the inherent tension between the state’s guarantee of religious rights versus the constitutional protection of citizens’ civil rights. My research begins within political theory, grounded in theories of liberalism, biopolitics, nationalism, and post-colonial studies. Part one traces the history of Israel from the late Ottoman period through the founding of the State in 1948, with consideration paid both to Israel’s founders (and the political Zionisms they espoused) and to political Zionism’s critics (including Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, and Judith Butler). I then turn to a examination of Israel’s PSLs, asking what is at stake when a liberal, democratic nation bases its laws governing marriage and divorce upon religious law rather than developing civil laws governing these institutions. Part two considers four legal arrangements caught in a crucial political paradox: laws and programs regulating the lives of women, laws outlawing polygynous marriages, changes in laws surrounding exogamous and cross-border marriages, and the treatment of Ethiopian Jews under the law. Each of these cases demonstrate the ways PSLs are used to address growing concerns over the security and national identity of the Jewish State. Through these four examples, Israel’s concerns over national identity, citizenship, and security become manifest, and one important instance of the paradox of liberalism comes into focus. Ultimately, while Israel is unique as the world’s only Jewish state, Israel becomes understandable as a liberal state experiencing many of the same anxieties and internal liberal problematics experienced by other states as well. Marriage, the Family, and Security in Israel: The Paradox of the Liberal State

Marriage, the Family, and Security in Israel: The Paradox of the Liberal State

Researchers and managers need to better understand how different ideas of ethics shape how artificial intelligence can be effectively applied and leveraged as a source of competitive advantage. More fundamentally, managers need to understand how the competitive use of artificial intelligence cannot be differentiated from the specific ethical claims reflected in the design, operation, management, and maintenance of the technology. We pose how AI can be given dimensions to provide better insight into ethical requirements. We pose, however, that there is no ethical panacea, rather that the effective global management of ethical and unethical AI requires a larger common meta-ethical approach.

A Manager’s Introduction to AI Ethics

This MRP seeks to illustrate why and how states circumstantially employ their sovereignty in regards to international forced migration. My thesis is, that states, dependent on their degree of sovereignty, are negligent in their capacity to accommodate refugees. In pursuing this thesis, I examine state sovereignty from the International Relations framework and conceptualize sovereignty as a derivative of the state. Furthermore, I situate ‘the state’ with political realism; and align its opposing paradigm, political idealism, with the United Nations. Using qualitative measurements of state sovereignty, I find that although states have signed international agreements that hold them accountable to facilitate in the resettlement of refugees when international conflict ensues, states claim that because refugees threaten security, as well as the economic, political, social integrity of the state, they cannot and will not accept them.

Key words: sovereignty, the state, refugees, International Relations, the United Nations

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Conceptualizing sovereignty and its relation to the State, refugees, and international relations

At present, administrative justifications for states to grant asylum tend to refer explicitly to moral and ethical “humanitarian” obligations. However, despite these motives, the broad preponderance of policies and governmental practices refer only to mere administrative expediency and not to humanitarian concerns. Why does a nation grant asylum—ostensibly, for reasons of humanitarian morality? How does a nation-state go about the tasks of granting asylum—through administrative practices generally un-informed by corresponding moral or ethical humanitarian guidelines? The standard for treatment quite often comes down to a minimal requirement, albeit a self-imposed one, for agencies to avoid “refouling” refugees—that is, to avoid putting refuge seekers in immediate danger as bad as or worse than what they fled. The prohibition on refoulment counts as a negative imperative designating what administrative agents ought not to do, but does not provide for specifically positive commission to treat refugees in any particular ways. Moreover, non-refoulment rules depend largely on domestic and international legal-juridical models that place primacy on risk reduction, ostensibly intended to minimize potential legal liabilities. As I argue, these minimum standards for asylum procedures count as politically expedient, but do not reflect moral criteria for evaluating such practices. What sort of criteria might nation-states use to evaluate the morality of institutional agents who administer and enforce asylum procedures, particularly given the need for political expediency ininternational contexts?

Christian Matheis

Papers

Refuge and Refusal: Credibility Assessment, Status Determination and Making It Feasible for Refugees to Say “No”